PATCHWORK— PATCHLIFE

mediainstallation by Sylvia Eckermann und Mathias Fuchs for a concept by philosopher Herbert Lachmayer
»Work & Culture« Linzer Landesmuseum, 1998



Sylvia Eckermann

PATCHWORK—PATCHLIFE, screen shots, collage


On the ocasion of a theme oriented exhibition at the Landesmuseum Oberösterreich »Work & Culture«, we designed a multi-sensory environment for 2 large data-projections, synchronized slide projectors, text-displays and 4 channel soundsystem. Our aim of visualizing a socio-philosophical concept was carried through in a playful manner, leaving space for audio-visual excursions into the field of personal lifestyles, careers, collisions and constellations. The process of patching parts together was our artistic imperative as well as the conceptual strategy for the show - pointing towards A Creative Way of Organising one's Life.

Herbert Lachmayer

PATCHWORK—PATCHLIFE

programmatic pamphlet for the show

»The trend towards becoming an information society can be seen not only in technical advances; innovative technology brings with it economic, social and structural changes that demand a new culture of how we live our daily life. The everyday working world has been qualitatively so dramatically altered through teleworking, outsourcing, de-hierarchisation, flexibility and networking, that the role images of traditional professions - that inevitably went hand-in-hand with a corresponding cliché idea about such persons' private lives - are beginning to dissolve and thus no longer function as imagined goals in a life plan. The ideal of the monosequential career - a linear progression consisting of school, training, profession etc., as a singular security guarantee within the achievement society - is facing competition from the increasing significance of the multisequential course of life in which professional and private options run parallel and in changing combinations. Short-term working contracts, jobbing, unemployment as free time, independent entrepreneurship alongside integrated project work, prestige free time as semi-private profession lobbying etc. have to be re-evaluated; in fact they need to be upgraded vis-à-vis standard attitides and the belief in a long-term fixed position, something that in any case will become less and less frequent in its traditional form. Instead of the idealogical polarisations of the 19th and 20th centuries, it appears that with the transformation of the old industrial society into an industrialised information society - due to the new technologies - a de-politicised individualism as survival-egoism is spreading, and this of course goes along with today's neo-liberal form of capitalism. Thus, the organisation of one's life gains in importance, with its private, professional and community-forming facets, as a creative act within our daily way of life; indeed, beyond its purely organisational functionalism it will become the cultural focus of our life. The design of life projects will no longer be reduced to quasi-initiational key decisions such as which school, choice of profession, marriage etc. Instead it will become, as permanent scenario technique of life design, an everyday matter.«